If Martin Broughton and his fellow board members win their forthcoming court battle with the current owners of Liverpool Football Club, securing the club's sale to New England Sports Ventures ("NESV"), most Liverpool supporters will no doubt celebrate. But the proposed deal leaves major questions unanswered about Liverpool's future and fans should temper their enthusiasm and continue to seek a long-term solution based on supporter ownership.

For all the glitz, money and self-proclaimed hype surrounding "the best league in the world", the English Premier League is a perfect example of how British institutions fail their wider stakeholders and the recent history of Liverpool FC is just the latest sad case of football putting money ahead of sport, community or tradition.

The decision by the majority shareholders, the Moores family, to sell out to Tom Hicks and George Gillett in 2007 was part of a wider trend for traditional, generally philanthropic, local owners to cash in to new, frequently profit-driven investors. Such deals have proved a tragedy for English football as they have replaced community and success on the pitch as the priorities for clubs with the pursuit of profit.

During the sale of Liverpool, just as in 2005 with the Glazers' takeover of Manchester United (the club I support) and again repeatedly between 2006 and 2010 with the revolving door ownership of Portsmouth FC, the Premier League and Football Association took no concrete action to vet the new owners or their plans.

The Premier League's rules have no provisions to limit the amount of debt loaded on to a club either during a takeover or subsequently. Despite the clear recommendations of the Taylor Report about affordability, the football authorities have taken no action to ensure clubs' core lower income supporters are not priced out of the game through ever higher ticket prices. There are no provisions for supporter representation on football club boards or for supporters to have stakes in clubs (in Germany most professional clubs have to be at least 51% owned by individual members). There are not even any rules to ensure clubs consult with their supporters (the Glazer family took no time in 2005 to expel the two democratic supporters' organisations from its "fans' forum").

Since the Portsmouth debacle, the Premier League claims to have tightened its rules, but the changes are cosmetic (see my analysis here) and the organisation remains "ownership neutral" (a stance that says a club owned by its fans is no better than one owned by an asset stripper) and refuses to follow the example of US sporting leagues in imposing restrictions on debt levels at its member clubs.

For Liverpool, the worst may have been avoided, but the laissez faire stance of the football authorities summed up by that phrase "ownership neutral" continues to pose major risks. Liverpool's prospective new owners, New England Sports Ventures are not buying the club for love, but to turn a profit. This is notoriously hard to do in football and Liverpool need significant investment both in the team following Rafa Benitez's ineffective spending spree and off the pitch where Anfield's 45,000 capacity means the club brings in £2m less in revenue per game than Arsenal or Manchester United.

Having found £300m to acquire Liverpool, where is this additional investment to come from? As with Hicks and Gillett in 2007, there are no clear answers. The new owners are wealthy but not in the oligarch category and thus the answer is surely more debt and higher ticket prices. No details of how NESV are financing the bid have been given, meaning neither the current board, supporters nor the FA have any idea of the group's ability to make the required investment. At the Boston Red Sox's Fenway Park home, NESV's ownership has seen huge price rises and normal seats replaced with expanded corporate facilities.

At the heart of the problem lies the continued hands-off, pro-business ideology at the centre of English football that sees supporters as merely irritating customers, not real stakeholders, despite the unique cultural role sport plays in society and which marks it out from "normal" businesses. Ours is a system that asks only whether a prospective owner is "good for the money" and asks nothing about their long-term plans for a club or its supporters. Would we treat our historic buildings the way we treat our football clubs? Isn't club football as key a part of our cultural life as bricks and mortar?

Until measures are introduced to give supporters a proper say in clubs, to prevent them being traded for profit by disinterested outsiders who feign sympathy and mouth platitudes but who know and care nothing of their traditions and importance to our national life, Liverpool FC and all other English clubs will be at risk and there will be little for anyone to celebrate.